


Mr. Yunioshi's Photographs

by osprey_archer



Category: Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life and times of Mr. Yunioshi, and why he lets Holly Golightly stay in her apartment rent-free. (Otherwise: can we make Mr. Yunioshi more of a character and less of an offensive caricature?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Yunioshi's Photographs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FairestCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairestCat/gifts).



Mr. Yunioshi keeps a photograph on his bedside table. It's a snapshot of his little sister Mari, her husband, and their three children, standing in front of a distant Mount Fuji on their vacation to Tokyo last year.

They all look grave, because a photograph is a serious occasion, but Mr. Yunioshi can tell they're happy. Mari, who was so skinny during the war that she looked like the wind could snatch her away, has a round, soft face. Her twin daughters have round faces too, and her little son is as plump as a teddy bear.

Mari's husband has a good job at a good company now; the economy in Japan is looking up. Mr. Yunioshi thinks that maybe, now that he's finally almost saved enough money to bring them over, Mari and her family will not want to come to New York.

***

The only other family member Mr. Yunioshi has a photograph of is his mother. There used to be a photograph of his mother and father's wedding day, but that burned up after the bombing; and he doesn't think there ever was a picture of his older sister, Hana.

Hana was seventeen in 1945, and studying in high school. She was one of the girls cleaning the streets of Hiroshima when the nuclear bomb hit.

She was one of the lucky ones. She wasn't incinerated; she wasn't covered with radiation burns; she didn't even lose too much of her hair. But maybe that wasn't so lucky, because their family was so poor after the war that she had to prostitute herself to American soldiers to get money for rice.

The American soldiers must have thought she was very beautiful, because she managed to get a ticket to the United States. She gave it to her little brother, because everyone agreed that a boy could make more money than a girl, and anyway her stomach was beginning to bloat out like a blowfish.

They thought one of the American soldiers had gotten her pregnant, but it turned out to be even worse than that. The American bomb had given her stomach cancer. She died in May 1947.

A few weeks after that, in June, Mr. Yunioshi sailed for the United States. He was going to make lots of money and bring his mother and his little sister over to live with him.

But it took longer to make money than he had thought. His mother decided that she wanted to die in Japan, and of course Mari stayed to take care of her; and by the time Mother died, Mari had a husband and three children and the money Mr. Yunioshi had saved wasn't enough to bring all five of them over.

And now, he thinks, Mari probably doesn't want to immigrate at all. She hasn't said as much, but after years and years of always writing him letters in English to practice, she has started to write to him in Japanese.

***

He isn't sure what he will do with the extra money if Mari and her family don't want to immigrate. He thinks maybe he will take a vacation to Japan. Mari lives in Kyoto now; he has never been to Kyoto, but it's supposed to be a beautiful city. When the Americans were deciding where to drop their nuclear bombs, they decided against Kyoto because of its historical importance and architectural beauty.

Mr. Yunioshi thinks this is a foolish way to decide which city to bomb. But he's just as glad they didn't bomb Kyoto; he has a book, one of those brightly colored photograph books that Americans like to publish about other countries, which has pictures of Kyoto. Sometimes when he feels homesick he flips through the book, although it doesn't look very much like Japan as he remembers it.

He didn't buy the book himself; that would have been extravagant. It was a present from his first friend in the United States, Jared, who was studying Japanese. Jared worked as a short order cook in the diner where Mr. Yunioshi got his first job in the United States, washing dishes, and after they got off shift they would sit at one of the booths and drink bad coffee, and Jared would speak Japanese and Mr. Yunioshi would speak English and they would correct each other's mistakes.

Neither of them ever lost their accents – Mr. Yunioshi's plagues him to this day; sometimes shopkeepers make a lemon-sucking face when they hear him talk. But the meetings were a very good thing in other ways; when Mr. Yunioshi got kicked out by his landlord because he was behind on his rent (because he had been mugged), he stayed with Jared's family until the next payday, because he didn't have enough money to rent someplace else and it was late December, bitter cold winter.

Jared gave Mr. Yunioshi the book about Kyoto before he went off to war in Korea in 1950. Jared got shot by the Chinese, and Jared's mother didn't want the book back when Mr. Yunioshi offered it to her, so he keeps it.

Jared's mother still sends Mr. Yunioshi a Christmas card every year. Of course Mr. Yunioshi doesn't celebrate Christmas, but he appreciates the gesture.

***

Mr. Yunioshi took up photography soon after he came to the United States, when he switched from his job washing dishes at the diner to washing dishes at a fancy restaurant. The work was the same but the pay was just enough better that he could afford a cheap Kodak camera, so he could send photographs to his mother and his little sister.

Of course he could have bought them postcards, and he did; but no one made postcards of the diner where he and Jared met or of the girl he dated for a little while.

(Then he found a second job, and she found a boyfriend who had more time for her. It was probably just as well. She looked Japanese but she was really only half Japanese, the other half Korean. His mother wouldn't have approved. Mr. Yunioshi wasn't quite sure he approved, himself. But she had been very pretty, very funny, and a very good cook; he still thought about her sometimes.)

It took a long time, because for the first few years he couldn't afford film very often, but eventually he became a good photographer. He even sold a couple of his photos to postcard manufacturers, and one snapshot from Central Park still shows up on postcard racks regularly.

Unfortunately, postcard sales didn't make a great deal of money. He had thought, given how many tourists bought so many postcards every year, that he would quickly have enough money to bring not just his mother and his sister and his sister's husband and children, but also any other aunts or uncles or cousins who wanted to come; but it didn't work out that way.

The apartment building he manages makes him a good, steady income – except for Holly Golightly, of course.

***

Miss Golightly never pays her rent.

Well, this is not quite true. Occasionally one of Miss Golightly's – friends? Boyfriends? Clients? – paid up all her arrears, but the whatever-they-were never lasted.

He should have kicked her out. She should have gone to a cheaper building (although he doubted she would be able to pay there, either; Miss Golightly's problem was not that she was poor, but that she had no sense of money. If she were an heiress with ten thousand a month, she would have spent it all.) He lost money every month on her utilities.

But he couldn't kick her out. He just couldn't bring himself to do it; it would be like stomping on a sparrow.

The photographs were a compromise. She was already a prostitute, so he thought she wouldn't mind posing nude; and after all, it would have made both of them a lot of money. Holly Golightly was a name to conjure with in New York. Copies of even one photograph, he was sure, would have paid for Mari and her family's immigration (if they wanted to immigrate), and for Miss Golightly's apartment for a year.

Miss Golightly smiled, said sure, and never showed up; and all the while she fell more and more in arrears, and had more and more parties that sent her utilities bills higher and higher.

Mr. Yunioshi looks at the photograph of Mari and her children standing in front of a far-distant Mount Fuji. He isn't sure what to do with all the money he's saved, if they don't want to come to New York; he figures that not turning Holly Golightly out in the streets like a stray cat is as good as anything else.


End file.
